Friday, August 31, 2012

What a week!!!. It's a new semester and it was bloody busy for me. My schedule is quite tight this semester and in the end, i taught 9 classes in a week. I postponed one of the class because there wasn't any confirmation from the other university from the IDDIT program.

At least, i managed to get them all without any major problems and hopefully the same situation goes better next week. Right now, all i need is some relaxing time to prepare for next week class :)

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Along with Mozilla Firefox 15, Mozilla also released Thunderbird 15 which incorporates several new features, such as the new instant messaging. It allows uses to talk to several IM protocols, such as GTalk, IRC, and XMPP. The Do-Not-Track features has been included as well.

A new menu and toolbar design has been included so that future releases will have the same and consistent theme along with Firefox releases.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Mozilla has placed Firefox 15 on their FTP Server, but no official announcement yet. Probably, they are waiting for mirror sites to download this package and preparing for the automatic update that will start downloading in the next 24 hours i guess.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Day 6 was another free time and we went to several places to hang out to spend some time before we went back to hotel to join with the rest of the tour members before leaving to the airport at around 8 PM. Even though our flight was scheduled at 00:50, we left to the airport early because we were afraid that the immigration process would be very long.

When we checked in, the counter told us that our flight would be delayed until 00:50, but in the end, that didn't delay it, so we still got the same schedule. To kill some time in the airport, i surfed the Internet because the airport provided free Internet connection. I could check my email because i haven't been able to check it for the last two days. The inbox got a lot of new messages.

Around 00:00 AM, we went to the boarding room and then we waited for our departure time. There were a lot of Indonesian people who were travelling back to Indonesia with us. I think 98% of the passengers were Indonesian. The flight took 4.5 hours and we arrived in Jakarta around 5 AM. We then took a shuttle bus to take us to terminal 1 where our next flight will take us back to Jogja.

When we arrived in Jogja, we had breakfast + lunch at Tojoyo and then we finally got home. We unpack everything, cleans up the luggage, and went to sleep because we couldn't sleep well during the flight.

Again, early in the morning, we went to the Shekou ferry terminal, but this time, we went back to Hong Kong. The journey took about 45 minutes, shorter than the first one. This time, i didn't get dizzy since i'm used to it.

When we arrived in HK, the immigration process awaits us and this was probably the worst one in terms of queue time. Even though there were like 10 officers, the number of passengers entering Hong Kong is growing like 500 people every 20 minutes. Well, it's probably because it's a high season and most students are on their vacations, so that's why it's so crowded.

In HK, we went to some famous places, such as Victoria Peak, Avenue of Stars, and also a local government shop (JC). We stayed in Panda Hotel for the next two days. This is the only hotel that didn't provide free Internet services to it's guest. The other hotel that i stayed it provided free Internet connection, even though it's only on the main lobby. They charge HKD40/hour or HKD100/1day for Internet connection.

Most of the time in Hong Kong were free time. I think the reason is because in Hong Kong, the price is higher than in Shenzhen and Macao. That's why the tour package didn't include a lot of places and doesn't include lunch nor dinner. Guest should find their own meals in HK.

In the next day, we went to Disneyland Resort guided with my mother-in-law's sister-in-law and her husband. They have bought the tickets for us and they also bring a MTR card to be used. The MTR system in HK is identical with the one in Singapore, but they have more lines as HK is way bigger than Singapore. They even connects two separated island, the Hong Kong and the New Territory. I wished Indonesia has this kind of system, so that people in Java island can travel to other island quickly.

Disneyland in HK is definitely bigger than Universal Studio in Singapore, so it was really fun there. We spend one full day in Disneyland and we also watched the final fireworks that marks the end of the Disneyland show every night. Too bad it was high season, so we couldn't try every attractions available in Disneyland, but we covered most of the big attractions.

One note to those who are planning to go to Disneyland: Don't go there during high season and always brings water supplies. It's very hot there and it's very expensive to buy water. It costs around HKD20/bottle. Use the refill facility instead near the toilets.

On day 3, we went to Macau via Shekou Ferry Terminal. We took the 9:30 schedule. For those who wanted to go to Macau from Shenzhen via ferry, please mind this note: There are no moving elevator in the terminal. So, if you plan to carry heavy luggage, prepare yourself to bring it to the second floor without any help. You must carry it on by yourself. The same situation repeated when you want to get into the ferry. There are no elevator, just steps. I have warned you :)

There were some inspections again on the borders before we enter the ferry, but the situation changed a little bit. The process was faster than in Shenzhen border. The trip to Macau took about 60 minutes and if you are good at sea travels, i would suggest you to take some medicine before. This is my first sea travel and i must admit, i got dizzy a little bit, but not to the level of vomitting.

When we arrived in Macau, the local tour guide: Alan picked us up. Since it was slightly raining, we had to change our schedule. The local tour was postponed and we went to The Venetian Macao Resort Hotel first. It was a HUGE hotel, equipped with casinos, shopping malls, food court, entertainments, and many others. It's the best place to spend and earn your money. Don't expect a fake products there, since all of the items sold were branded items.

We then go to several places in Macau, such as the Ruins of St. Paul, A-Ma Temple, and then finally, we arrived in our hotel, Presidente hotel, in front of Wynn hotel where there were famous show at night. We didn't see the show because my wife had to take some rest.

I really couldn't sleep in the airplane, so i tried to watch movies, listening to the music using the small screen attached in the seat in front of me. Finally i was able to sleep for few hours before i decided to watch an old movie: The Tourist. It really a good way to spend some time when you can't sleep in the plane.

Our plane landed around 5 AM local time in Hong Kong and we got out of the plane to proceed with the immigration process. There were LOTS of people coming in to Hong Kong everyday, especially during vacations like this. I had to wait almost 30 minutes to get into the immigration officers to gave stamp on my passport and allowed me to enter Hong Kong. I really wished that they opened up more station to fasten up the immigration process. There were only two stations (later, they opened up another station) available and there were like 300 people waiting to be processed and the number keeps increasing as more flight has arrived in the morning.

Next, we took a bus to Shenzhen guided with a local guide. Since we used a group visa, we had to queue up according to the list we were listed when we reached the borders. It took almost 45 minutes just to get my approval to enter Shenzhen. I think the border officer in China is a lot stricter than in Hong Kong. I was told by the local guide that some Chinese people don't use and learn Alphabets, so when they saw a non-Chinese names, they have to read it one by one. That's why it took so long to process one people at the border.

In Shenzhen, we went to several places, such as Lou Hu market, Window of the World, Splendid China, and China Folk Cultures villages. I took several photo shots there with my wife and i'm uploading it right now on my Facebook. We also went to the government shops (which is mandatory for every tour package in China).

At night, we finally arrived at our hotel, Century Plaza Hotel near Lou Hu market and get some rest.

Day 1 of my trip wasn't exciting at all, because all we did was waiting and waiting in the airport. I took a 4.30 PM flight to Jakarta from Jogja with my wife, my mother-in-law, and her grand-daughter (my wife's niece, Angie). The flight was delayed for 10 minutes, and i had no complaint on it since my next flight will be on 00:45 AM next day. Angie was so excited on this trip since this is her first abroad trip. Even though she was ill since two days ago, she kept insisting of going with us.

Finally the plane flew us to Jakarta and the problem started during the flight. Angie kept vomitting in the plane. She had some problems with travelling, mostly long-distance travelling. Because she was ill as well, the situation gets worse. We landed in Jakarta around 6 PM and we took a shuttle bus to switch to terminal 2 for international departure. There is a free shuttle bus service around the airport that operates for 24 hours. All you have to do is to find the stop point and wait for them. It's very visible, since it has yellow color on it.

When we reached the terminal 2, we joined with other passengers who are in the same group as we were. The tour leader for our group is Livia. She is smaller than my wife. Because we still have a long time before our flight, we had dinner first. Angie's situation didn't change much. She keeps vomitting anytime she ate something.

Finally, our plane arrived and we boarded to the plane and left Indonesia to Hong Kong...

Sunday, August 26, 2012

It's been a tiring two days since my days in Hong Kong were so tight. It ended today as i flew from Hong Kong International Airport this morning and goes directly to Jakarta around 00:45 AM and arrived in Jakarta about 5 AM. Next, i'm waiting for departure to Jogja which was scheduled at 9 AM, but delayed until 9:30 AM.

Finally, i'm at home right now and all i need is rest, rest, and rest. I will try to cover up my trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Macau for tomorrow's post.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Valve is planning to release a new version of Counter Strike: Global Offensive on August 21 2012.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
is the latest game in Valve's wildly-successful Counter-Strike
franchise built atop their impressive Source Engine. CS:GO has been in
beta for a number of months already while next week will mark its
official release. This first person shooter is initially being released
for Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a native Linux
version will very likely come once Valve begins shipping their Steam
client and Source-based games for Linux.

For those who are running Wine, you can be quite happy since this game has been reported to have Gold Rating.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Today is Indonesian Independence Day, so it's a national holidays. It will be my last weekend before i go to vacation this Sunday until next week.

While most of the people go back to their hometown (mudik) due to long holiday, i will be travelling out of my home town for my last vacation this year before i will be quite busy until the end of this year.

As always, i may not be able to have proper Internet connection while i'm abroad, so don't expect me to reply your messages quickly as usual. I may be late for Slackware 14.0 releases, but it will be sorted out later when i got back.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

BackTrack 5 R3 has been released and there are over than 60 new tools has been included in this release. Some of them have been demonstrated in the BlackHat and Defcon 2012. A whole new tool category was populated – “Physical Exploitation”, which
now includes tools such as the Arduino IDE and libraries, as well as
the Kautilya Teensy payload collection.

For those who wanted to upgrade from 5 R2, here's how to do it:

Make sure your system is fully updated by runningapt-get update&&apt-get dist-upgrade

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

I had to accompany my mother to the hospital tonight and we got queue number 23 and unfortunately, we became the last patient at that night. We had to wait until 11 PM before we can come in.

The problem was that two of the main head doctors went overseas, thus all of their patients are transferred to another doctors. That's why the waiting list is so long. Fortunately, some of the patients who couldn't wait any longer decided to postpone their treatment until the next day so that my waiting time can be reduced.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

For some time, there hasn't been a great comparison article about Slackware. Most of the article i saw usually compared Slackware to other Linux distribution that has different point of view of how operating system should be developed, so it tends to be a biased review.

But yesterday, i saw a new article has been brought up back to Twitter about Arch vs Slackware. It's an old article, but i found it very interesting since it tried to compare two Linux distribution that shares the same basic philosophy: simplicity. No fancy GUI during installation, mostly manual configuration required, and highly configurable.

I also like the conclusion, since it gives both side pros and cons based on the facts:

Monday, August 13, 2012

For the past few weeks, i have been following FileZilla, an Open Source project which aim to provide a free FTP solution. I am the maintainer of this package in SBo project and i noticed that it doesn't get too much update lately.

Their latest release for the client side was in January and for the server side was in February this year. Their last changeset in the SVN repository was last July. I don't know what happened with this project. Was it abandoned or was it already considered mature so that no more changes are required to be implemented on this project?

I like FileZilla since it's multiplatform and it suited my need for a client-side FTP application. It has a nice site manager which basically manage my site i maintained.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Looks like i have to start working on materials i wanted to give to the students this semester as i have quite tight schedule. There are some new materials that i would like to give and i also have one new class this semester.

For computer security, i revamped the course and i removed most of the security awareness part and i focused on the cryptography area. This is the most interesting part.

For the new class, it will be network administration and i will be using Slackware Linux as the base OS throughout the whole semester, so i'm hoping that the students can learn more about maintaining a server, mostly when they are using Slackware Linux spesifically.

I'm hoping that i can finish 1 material per day like what i have done today. Let's see if this strategy works for this week :)

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Automated process can be easily done by using crontab, but a new problem arises when you need to provide some credentials, such as user/password in order to execute some task, such as pulling git automatically, uploading files to FTP server, and many others.

With some use of expect programming, it can be easily be solved. Expect has three main commands:

spawn

expect

send

Spawn is used to execute a command or a file. Please note that all command that you wish to execute must be placed on a file and let spawn call this file. You should also use an absolute path or you will have problems when debugging it.

Next is expect. This command will try to compare what output does the process gave us and compare it with some strings that you have provided in the script. When it matches, you can do something with it, for example give your users/password when there's a login prompt.

Last command is send, which is obvious. It sends some strings to the process and it replaces our manual input. Don't forget to end the string with "\r" so that it emulates ENTER button being pressed.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Patrick Volkerding has announced Slackware 14.0 this morning and it's now getting closer to a final release which i think it could be this month. On the latest update, he pulled Linux Kernel 3.2.26 and also KDE 4.8.5 to be included.

This update also included a lot of bug fixes that has been reported since Beta release in many media, mostly in LQ forum. Some of the applications gets upgraded and the rest gets rebuilt.

I'm going to use Slackware Linux as a base operating system for one of my class this semester and hopefully i can use Slackware 14.0. It will be a nice and new experience for me to use a newly released distribution in a class. It's not just a regular class, but networking administration class and i will use Slackware Linux for the whole semester, no Windows material again.

I hope the students gets a new experience of tasting the oldest and still maintained Linux distribution on the planet.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

Since i will be going abroad starting from August 19 up to 27, i will have to finish up my work here before i go or else people will start calling me. I'm trying to make sure everything has been finished by the time i'm gone for short vacation before this semester starts.

I have two articles which i need to finish, hopefully i can finish them by the end of this week and starting next week, i will have to prepare for this semester, including a discussion with the assistants before they will start the lab class on the third week or so.

It's gonna busy semester, but i have to enjoy it anyway since it's my job, my passion, and my spirit :)

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

LibreOffice 3.6.0 has been released with a lot of interesting new features. It took some time to finish this version and it takes up to 4 RC releases before the team decided to release the final version.

Michael Meeks posted on his blog about progress to LibreOffice 3.6.0. He has mentioned this over and over in the past few months and years, but nevertheless, it's something good to share. LibreOffice 3.6.0 is progressing on many areas, including:

Today is the registration day for this semester. Students are coming back to school and their journey for this semester starts on the registration day where they had a chance to pick up the available and offered classes by the school.
Usually my schedule has some spare times so that i can add new classes when there's enough demand from the students, but i guess it won't happened this semester as i'm already full to begin with. There are no more classes by me for this semester besides what has been scheduled or else i would end up taking too much classes and i can't really enjoy this semester like it supposed to be. Teaching should be fun!!!

Usually, when a new Slackware release is coming up, admin in SlackBuilds project are busy testing the packages for the upcoming releases by themselves while the contributors are waiting until the next release and they just submit a patch to make it work on the new release, but i guess that changes now.
On the preparation phase for Slackware 14.0, contributors of SBo projects has started to sent bomb of messages to the mailing list about their package status. While most of them are buildable on future Slackware 14.0, some of them are no longer compilable and need more patch or version upgrade. With the original maintainer taking care of this, it should be easier for the admins to make sure the package is ready when Slackware 14.0 gets released.
This is how the community works around Slackware Linux Project to make sure it still has good quality control before public users uses them.

Monday, August 06, 2012

Michael Phelps has set a new record which i think will be hard to be beaten in the next 10 years or so. He just got 18 gold medals in all of his participation in the olympic arena. His first appeareance 12 years ago didn't end well, but he started to shine at the 2004 Athena and his peak was in Beijing in 2008 where he grabbed all the gold medals that he could possibly won. It was a world record that no swimmer has had it before. In London, he got 3 gold medals. Not his best, but i think it's normal due to aging.
He decided to retire after this event. What a great accomplishment. Good bye Phelps. Your record will remain be remembered and i guess no one could ever achieve the same thing you have achieved in the last 12 years.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

This month, my mother and mother in law is celebrating their birthday. My mother in law had her birthday today and my mother will have it on August 8. They are four days apart, while me and my wife is three days apart. We were born in the same month and same year, so we have the same zodiac, which is Taurus and based on Chinese zodiac, it will be a pig.

We had our dinner in Pattaya just now. It's a nice place located in Jl. Damai, near Jimbaran. If you want to go there, just find Hyatt Hotel and take right when you see a sign of Pari restaurant in the left. Follow the road for about 400 m and you will see Pattaya in your right. There's a big name sign so you will not miss it.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Me and my wife decided to watch Batman: Dark Knight Rises this afternoon at Amplaz. We waited some time before watching this movie because of our tight schedule and also due to fact that it's also playable on amplaz where buy 1 get 1 program is also available for BCA credit card users (only on weekend).

I'm impressed with the story, since it's not only showing Batman's technology but also struggles about his personal feelings and emotions about Gotham. There are also romance involved on this movie, and the last surprise is about the arrival of Batman's partner: Robin.

It's kinda regretful that Christopher Nolan will not produce any sequel to the Batman movies, but we will be waiting for his next movie. I'm sure it would be another great movie.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Today i was pretty busy with my office work and also my side project. My busy day started when i have to evaluate my student's final presentation at 8 AM until 10 PM. I can take some rest for a while since i have spare time for one hour.

Next, i have to attend colloquium which was held from 11 AM. I didn't know that it would take so long to finish. There were so many students who propose their research proposal on this chance because we have changed the rule for next semester registration. Only those who have passed colloquium who can register for their final project. Oh well, it ended finally :)

At night, i still have to discuss the project with my team member. I barely have 30 minutes to rest from the time i got home from my office before i have to meet with the others. I finally made back home at 9.30 PM at night and i posted this post.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

After watching 2012 London Opening Ceremony, i kinda feel dissappointed with it. With big funding, i thought that it would be as big as it was in Beijing, but i guess i'm wrong. It's more like telling British's history from the industrial era through the modern era. It doesn't show any cultures that want to be shown to the world.

Oh well, i guess the Chinnese did better in the opening ceremony and i think it will be remembered as the best performance in the history of Olympic. We will have to proof whether it's correct or not in the next Olympic four years later and see if the upcoming host can do better.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Dave Airlie has posted an exploit which was sent to him anonymously some time ago and he has tested it and it worked well to gain root access by using privilege escalation exploit.

What's the detail of the exploit?

It basically abuses the fact that the /dev/nvidia0 device accept changes to the VGA window and moves the window around until it can read/write to somewhere useful in physical RAM, then it just does an priv escalation by writing directly to kernel memory.

Please note that the script might kill your system. Review the content first before executing it and NEVER EVER execute the script on your production machine. Use it on your own risk.